I’ve used this for the past several years but I feel like it’s not really helping me find draft picks. What’s the best way to scout the draft and make sure you get the most out of it? Would love to hear people’s process.

I hate the formula builder. I thought I could perfect it to do the work but honestly, you'll end up with a dud more often then not.

You have to put in the leg work by yourself. I'll usually take the list of all of the prospects and sort by what I feel to be most important (VsR for hitters VsR for pitchers) and order the guys I feel are best. Then I'll look for outliers (Catchers with high defensive stats. Defensive SS, batters who can rake against a leftie and steal bases or have great range. Pitchers that can get one big out against a leftie in the bullpen) to round out my draft board. I'll usually rank about 30 players each draft and I have found that often is enough to cover my first 3-5 picks which is where I find you get the guys who play in the big leagues anyways.

Good luck.

Problem with the Formula Builder is that the only way to test it is to actually draft. Sure, I messed around with it. So you reorder the projections. You fiddle with it until you come up with something that looks different from what drafting "the regular way" (position-based) gives you. Do you know if it's better or worse? There's no test run, you have to actually draft. How much of a sample size does it take to see if you're benefiting from it or not, five seasons? Ten?

Are you going to blow ten real drafts on an experiment that could prove to make no difference?

So I went back to positional drafting.

Never used it. I usually draft near the bottom. I usually just go like 10-16 in either college or hs 0 in the other. I just manually rank the top 100. I get 1 ml player a season if I am lucky 2-3 if I have a type a or b leave.

I have found it better to do nothing and let WIS draft than using the formula builder. The only way to get the draft right is to do it yourself. I usually rank the top 50 - 150 depending on my budgets.

I rank 15-25 players at most depending on how many picks I have in the top 5 rounds. I’m very active in FA but even in Cal Ripken I had 3&6 in the 1st round and only ranked my top 10 was able to get the only good player in the draft and then get a Comp pick for 6 because he didn’t sign. After the top 15-25 I’ve found there usually isn’t anyone worth anything. Over time I’ve started to rank just a top 10-15 and end up with the same results as I would’ve ranking more players. The formula builder is a waste to be honest.

Posted by hockey1984 on 2/18/2020 7:50:00 AM (view original):
I hate the formula builder. I thought I could perfect it to do the work but honestly, you'll end up with a dud more often then not.

You have to put in the leg work by yourself. I'll usually take the list of all of the prospects and sort by what I feel to be most important (VsR for hitters VsR for pitchers) and order the guys I feel are best. Then I'll look for outliers (Catchers with high defensive stats. Defensive SS, batters who can rake against a leftie and steal bases or have great range. Pitchers that can get one big out against a leftie in the bullpen) to round out my draft board. I'll usually rank about 30 players each draft and I have found that often is enough to cover my first 3-5 picks which is where I find you get the guys who play in the big leagues anyways.

Good luck.

I do almost exactly the above --

1. Set draft settings to where there is no priority on position or pitching;
2. Take the players and their respective projected ratings and throw them in a spreadsheet;
3. Sort spreadsheet by ratings I prefer;
4. Look for outliers as referenced above -- great fielder's, C's or platooners; and
5. If I can find the time, I might take some fliers on some lottery tickets

Thanks everyone! Looks like I’ll be going back to drafting the old fashioned way. Letting the computer sort and then manually going through and arranging who I like or don’t like.

Posted by tlowster on 2/18/2020 3:41:00 PM (view original):

Posted by hockey1984 on 2/18/2020 7:50:00 AM (view original):
I hate the formula builder. I thought I could perfect it to do the work but honestly, you'll end up with a dud more often then not.

You have to put in the leg work by yourself. I'll usually take the list of all of the prospects and sort by what I feel to be most important (VsR for hitters VsR for pitchers) and order the guys I feel are best. Then I'll look for outliers (Catchers with high defensive stats. Defensive SS, batters who can rake against a leftie and steal bases or have great range. Pitchers that can get one big out against a leftie in the bullpen) to round out my draft board. I'll usually rank about 30 players each draft and I have found that often is enough to cover my first 3-5 picks which is where I find you get the guys who play in the big leagues anyways.

Good luck.

I do almost exactly the above --

1. Set draft settings to where there is no priority on position or pitching;
2. Take the players and their respective projected ratings and throw them in a spreadsheet;
3. Sort spreadsheet by ratings I prefer;
4. Look for outliers as referenced above -- great fielder's, C's or platooners; and
5. If I can find the time, I might take some fliers on some lottery tickets

I forgot my last ranking part (but this is strictly for fun)

since I’m canadian and the game generates very few Canadian players, I’ll usually rank them higher when I know it’ll be the later rounds (so generally ranked between the 40th and higher spot on my board). It’s kinda fun to have players that were born close to home or at cities I’ve been to playing in my minor league system.

Yeah, dump everything into excel and build your own formulas. Much easier than trying to monkey around with the in-game one.

Posted by brianplath on 2/20/2020 10:47:00 AM (view original):
Yeah, dump everything into excel and build your own formulas. Much easier than trying to monkey around with the in-game one.

I have my own formulas. And then I go through and manually adjust.